Pinball Aficionado is my personal labor of love and is for you, the pinhead, the pinball fan, the aficionado. It is for everyone, from the person who is just entering the hobby and is trying to understand what all the hoopla is about, to the seasoned collector with 30 years of experience under his or her belt. Enjoy!

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Spiderman Shop Job Part 2

Ugh! I think that stuff is still on my hands........ Well, if you're just joining us Aficionados, in the last entry (Spiderman Shop Job Part 1), my buddy picked up a routed (what an understatement) Stern Spiderman pinball machine and invited me over to check it out and help him clean it. Turns out this game was extremely worn and dirty and there was so much soot and filth that we both thought it might be beyond salvation.

Dirty Parts to Disassemble...

Despite that, we carried on. I grabbed more towels, more alcohol and got the Novus 2 ready.

Alcohol to the Rescue!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We continued to disassemble the playfield (which we detached from the cabinet and put on a workbench), and got a system going where he would unscrew a part from the wood and I would separate it in a cup or a spot on the floor with other parts from the specific playfield area where it came from. Mind you I took over 100 photographs of the playfield from every angle, and then took photos of areas of the game right before we would remove parts, all so that a record of positions would be available to help in the reassembly.

Parts were everywhere!!!

After everything topside had been removed, my friend and I proceeded to take the alcohol, apply it to the shop towels and then began to clean the filth off the surface. It's important to wipe it away onto the towel and not rub it into the wood, as that will only make things worse. The crap came off in huge quantities.

Wiping the playfield's backboard with Alcohol...

Eek! Look at that crap come off!!!

At this point he and I were sweating, swearing, badmouthing the previous owner, it involved a LOT of elbow grease to say the least. He took a towel, I took one, and we were double teaming the surface (you know, that sounds kind of "dirty" har har har), anyway after a bit we started to see the original color of the art again. You know, while we were badmouthing the previous op for his horrible maintenance, I gotta take this moment to thank and praise Steve Ritchie (the game's designer) for making a game that was done in such a way to have easy access to all the major areas for cleaning and straight forward disassembly. We weren't in a "White Water" situation here where we had to disassemble layers upon layers of playfields and ramps to get stuff off. It wasn't that bad, and that kind of thought toward maintenance seems to be a Ritchie trademark.After it was cleaned, we took clean towels and applied the Novus to them and then we polished the cleaned wood. In this case we rubbed the Novus in so that the polish would work its magic and after a ton of polishing, the game's art looked amazing!

Rubbing and wiping the playfield with Novus 2...

Despite all the dirt and soot that had been on the wood, the playfield came back to a shine that made it look new again. It was incredible! Stern's factory clearcoat is pretty impressive stuff, despite all the crap that had formed on top, the original art had been protected underneath and after the clean and polish, it came out to shine once again.Now............Time to clean all those disassembled parts...........oh boy.............

Dirty plastic to be cleaned...

That's one dirty ramp!!!

Doc Ock waiting to be cleaned and re-installed...

Sandman waiting for his turn to be cleaned and rebuilt (that does NOT look like Lowell to me somehow...)